Such a ball-and-socket joint, as is known, e.g., from U.S. Pat. No. 6,042,294 or U.S. Pat. No. 6,010,272 and can be used as a wheel guide joint for motor vehicles, comprises a housing, which has a cavity that is open on at least one side. A bearing shell with a joint ball mounted therein is inserted into this cavity.
In solutions according to the documents cited, the bearing shell is displaceable together together with the joint ball accommodated by it in the cavity along an axis coinciding with the axis of symmetry of the bearing shell, and a first collar and a second collar, between which a limited free path of the displaceable bearing shall is thus defined, form end stops in the cavity of the housing, so that the assembly unit comprising the bearing shell and the joint ball can be moved slidingly to and fro between the first collar and the second collar of the housing. Slide bearings have a clearance, which is called “bearing slackness,” between the bearing surfaces sliding on one another. This bearing slackness is the cause that the combination of a slide bearing with a ball-and-socket joint has been able to be solved only unsatisfactorily so far. The ball-and-socket joint embodiments according to U.S. Pat. No. 6,042,294 or U.S. Pat. No. 6,010,272 also fail to offer a satisfactory solution to this.
Another problem is that especially the ball-and-socket joints in the wheel carrier of a motor vehicle are subject to high thermal loads. These stem from adjacent components, such as the brakes, and have a lasting affect on the mounting characteristics. Even though heat protection shields are sometimes meaningful, they cannot permanently protect the ball-and-socket joints, so that there is a need for joints that have an approximately constant mounting characteristic despite extreme temperature changes. These difficulties in prior-art ball-and-socket joints increase with increasing outside temperature and are additionally intensified by the temperature effects on the components receiving the ball-and-socket joint in the motor vehicle.